Big Data: Technology, Applications and Challenges

On Sunday, Feb 16th, Dr. Shirin Noekhah, presented a seminar entitled Big Data. She introduced the Big Data concept by describing data as quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, which may be stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical, or mechanical recording media. She added that Big Data is also data but with a huge size. It is used to describe a collection of data that is huge and yet growing exponentially with time. In short, such data is so large and complex that none of the traditional data management tools are able to store it or process it efficiently. The big data technologies and initiatives are rising to analyse this data for gaining insights that can help in making strategic decisions. When such enormous volumes of data can be analysed in a single context, certain kinds of trends can become visible that otherwise would remain hidden.

She explained that Big Data can be found in three forms including Structured, Unstructured, and Semi-structured. Volume, Variety, Velocity, Variability are the main four characteristics of big data. Ability to process Big Data brings in multiple benefits, such as:

Businesses can utilize outside intelligence while taking decisions

Access to social data from search engines and sites like Facebook and twitter enables the organizations to fine-tune their business strategies

Improving customer service

Early identification of risk to the product/services, if any

Better operational efficiency

Dr. Noekhah discussed the Big Data technologies which can be used for creating a staging area or landing zone for new data before identifying what data should be moved to the data warehouse. In addition, such integration of Big Data technologies and data warehouse helps an organization to offload infrequently accessed data.